R.I.P. Herbert "Cowboy" Coward, Deliverance actor
Coward is known for playing one of two terrifying mountain men in the 1972 thriller. He was 85.
Herbert “Cowboy” Coward—known for his chilling role in John Boorman’s 1972 thriller Deliverance—has died. As reported by ABC News, Coward was killed in a car crash Wednesday afternoon in his home state of North Carolina, along with his girlfriend, Bertha Brooks, age 78, and two pets—a chihuahua and a squirrel. He was 85.
According to local authorities, the crash occurred while Coward was pulling out of the parking lot of a doctor’s office, where his car was hit by a pickup truck trying to avoid him. Police determined that the driver, 16, wasn’t speeding and that Coward and Brooks weren’t wearing their seat belts. No charges have been filed.
Coward was born in North Carolina in 1938 and lived in the state all his life. For many years, he worked as an outlaw gunfighter at an Old West ghost town amusement park. It was during this time that he met Burt Reynolds, a connection that helped him land the Deliverance audition.
“Burt had my number and called me to come over there where they were going to be filming. He said when the producer comes in, he’ll ask you to act like you’re mad and act like you’re hurt. Then he’ll ask you, ‘Is that as mad as you can act?’ and you just do whatever flies into your head. So when he [the producer] asked me that, I just slapped him. He said, ‘That’s mad enough’ and I got the job,” Coward said of the process (via ABC).
In Deliverance, Coward plays a toothless mountain man who stages a brutal assault on another character in the film. He performed all his own stunts for the movie, including being lowered from a cliff into a river, and was well known for his oft-repeated line, “He got a real purty mouth, ain’t he?” He also appeared in Ghost Town: The Movie (2007) and a series called Hillbilly Blood in 2013.